Robust Extraction of Urban Area Extents in HR and VHR SAR Images

This work is devoted to analyze the performance and adapt the parameters requested for the operational use of a methodology aimed at urban extent extraction. The procedure, initially proposed in a reduced version in a previous paper, has been expanded and improved to make it useful with different HR and VHR radar sensors, and extensive comparison of the results in many different parts of the world have been considered. In this work the approach is compared against reference settlement extents obtained from maps provided by the most relevant global mapping projects. Considerations about the robust ness of the approach to different spatial resolution, adaptiveness of the parameter range to the SAR sensor characteristics and other issues dealing with practical implementation of the whole procedures complete the research work discussed in these pages.